Category Archives: News

Some of the members of the International ICanFunction (mICF) Partnership were able to meet at the Annual Meeting of the World Health Organization Family of International Classifications (WHO-FIC) in Tokyo, Japan from 8th – 14th of October 2016.

The event was also an opportunity to showcase the recent developmental steps for our mHealth solution, connecting with other international members at this important WHO meeting. See presentation here.

On the picture from left to right: Haejung Lee (South Korea), Matilde Leonardi (Italy), Olaf Kraus de Camargo (Canada), Trish Saleeby (USA), Joanne Valerius (USA), Liane Simon (Germany) and Michaela Coenen (Germany). Haejung and Matilde were also elected as new chairs for the Functioning and Disability Reference Group (FDRG), Olaf accepted the role for the secretariat of FDRG.

MedicineX is the most discussed health care conference in the world. In 5 conferences over 20 million people were reached! We were extremely pleased to be accepted at Stanford MedicineX 2016 as this is a conference that aligns perfectly with our philosophy – We put the person into personalized medicine.

Olaf with Lieutenant Colonel Downing Lu, MD, Chief Quality Officer for the National Capital Region and LaVerne Council, Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology and CIO for the Office of Information and Technology within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

“MedicineX has changed how health care providers and patients engage with and learn from one another by amplifying the patient voice in academic medicine. Including the patient voice has moved providers beyond knowing how to treat a disease to learning what it is like to live with a disease.”

That is exactly what we want to achieve by facilitating the use of the ICF by patients and caregivers: Allow them to share how they experience health, what are their limitations and goals for treatment.

“Patients have their voice added to the conversation, but true engagement will require meaningful participation from everyone. Diverse expertise and experiences in a health care team where power is shared in an environment of trust and respect leads to more creative and innovative solutions to health care problems.”

Attending the conference also provided opportunities to connect with likeminded developers, patients and healthcare providers, learn from their projects and explore possibilities for collaboration.
A video of the talk will soon be live on the Stanford MedicineX website.

In August 2016 a small working group of the mICF partnership submitted a grant application to the U.S. based federal agency, National Institutes of Health entitled “ICanFunction mHealth Solution (mICF): Improving mental health of vulnerable youth in South Africa by mapping narratives of context and functioning to ICF.”

If successfully funded, a mental health mICF prototype will be developed and pilot-tested that captures user-driven information to improve the understanding of one’s mental health and well-being. The mobile application would be useful to both consumer users and health/social welfare professionals.

A prototype of a patient-driven ICF-based assessment tool is being developed for persons with severe disabilities so that they can self-report their life situation.

A Finnish team is developing the first mICF proof of concept in their “Feasibility Study of a Patient-driven Mobile ICF-based ICanFunction Assessment Tool (mICF)”.This one-year project (2016-2017) aims to design and develop a first prototype (POC, Proof of Concept) of the mICF for person-centered assessment of functioning based on ICF.

After a successful pitch of mICF in the Dutch Hackethon, a team worked out a mock up to build an interface for mICF. The team used the case of Tineke, a patient suffering from spinal cord disease, having a dream: travelling to Rome. But when she wanted advice on how she could travel to Rome without any medical dangers, the healthcare professional simply pointed out that her medical issues would prevent her from doing so. While healthcare professionals deal with patients and their health problems, patients view themselves as people with goals, needs, wishes and dreams. During a consult these views are not always aligned. Hence, opportunities to increase a patient’s quality of life might be missed.

The Term Editor is an open source software suited for developing and maintaining terminologies, ontologies and information structures. The mICF content in Term editor includes ICF (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health) terms, natural language terms (i.e. related terms and synonyms) and terms from instruments to measure functioning in different languages.

7 months agoICanFunction Health, an operations company in the mICF ecosystem, just started with the development of a frontend application for persons with insulin-resistance. This innovation will be a gamechanger. Watch this space. @ProfTimNoakes

8 months agoToday 6 years ago the ICanFunction mHealth Solution (mICF) partnership was formed at a WHO-FIC meeting in Beijing. @StefanusSnyman was asked to present the concept to Council. We came a long way, but still so far to go. We salute all the mICF partners. https://t.co/n7gKJnlMAc

1 year agoThis is why persons must own and be in full control who has access to their health records and who may share it with who. They should also consent and share in the profit if their records are anonymised for big data analysis and to inform AI. All the more reason for mICF. https://t.co/iqOeCmGJ5V